Theory & criticism Flashcards
What does it help us do?
Encourages us to think differently, to understand the interconnectedness of things, to find the story behind the story
Russian Formalists
- Victor Shklovsky
- Roman Jakobson
- Boris Tomashevsky
- Boris Eichenbaum
What did the Russian formalists consider literature
Not as a window on the world but as something specifically literary characteristics that make it literature as opposed to philosophy or sociology or biography
Key term Russian formalists
‘Defamiliarisation’ - Literature presents objects from such an unusual perspective and in such unconventional and self-conscious language that our habitual, ordinary, rote perceptions of those things are disturbed
1887 professor of history at oxford Edward Freeman
‘We are told that the study of literature “cultivated the taste, educates the sympathies and enlarges the mind”. These are all excellent things only we cannot examine tastes and sympathies. Examiners must have technical and positive information to examine.’
Literature has to be studied along w language or else it wouldn’t be an academic study at all (oxford English contains strong element of historical language study)
Freeman 1887 ‘what is meant by distinguishing literature from language if by literature is meant the study of great books, and not mere chatter about Shelley’
When was English course finally set up at oxford
- Strong historical language study - Anglo-Saxon, gothic, middle English
Cambridge English 1920s
- IA RICHARDS (pioneered ‘practical criticism’)
- WILLIAM EMPSION
- FR LEAVIS
Matthew Arnold
19th century critic said the true business of criticism is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’
Continuity in literature, Pope
‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’
Keats on influencing / political literature
‘We distrust literature which has a palpable design upon us’
Earliest work of theory
Aristotle’s ‘poetics’ (4th century BC) about the nature of literature itself. First ‘reader-centred’ approach to literature abt how tragedy affected the audience; Pity + fear + catharsis
Ovid’s definition of literature
Mission is ‘docere delectando’ - to teach by delighting
Sir Phillip Sidney develops in ‘apology for poetry’, quotes Horace that ‘a poem is a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight’
Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry
- Sees poetry engaged in what 20th century Russian critics called ‘defamiliarisation’
Poetry ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world… it purged from our inward sight the film of familiarity’
Tradition & the Individual talent
1919 essay puts forward notion of impersonality (distinction between writer (person in work) and the author (Eliot))
Eliot’s major critical ideas
- Dissociation of sensibility (sep thought and feeling)
- Notion of poetic ‘impersonality’
- Notion of the ‘objective correlative’
Saussure key quotes on words as signified / signifier
‘Both parts … are psychological’
‘The linguistic sign unites, not a Thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image’
Barthes Mythologies
Chains of signs which become a signifier e.g Romans’ ‘fringe, sweat, close ups’, adverts and luxury brands (semiological chains)
Define Language (Saussure)
A system of signs that expresses ideas
What is semiology
A science that studies the life of signs with society
‘The bond between the signifier and the signified is
Arbitrary’
Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage
The moment in which the child forms an identity (or ego) as distinct from the basic (id) or idealised projected image of the self called the imago.
Characterised by recognition of his own image in the mirror
Parapraxis
When you mean one thing but say your mother
Foucault examines
The relationship between power and knowledge. Looks at institutions that enable power to be maintained like prisons, schools, the justice system
